Timothy George Hawarden FRAS (24 December 1943 – 10 November 2009) was a South African astrophysicist known for his pioneering work on passive cooling techniques for space telescopes for which he won NASA's Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal.
[3] In 1975 he worked as the Deputy Astronomer-in-Charge of the UK Schmidt Telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
[6][7] He returned to Edinburgh in 2001 and became the UK Astronomy Technology Centre Project Scientist developing extremely large telescopes (ELT) before retiring in 2006 to care for his wife Frances.
[15][16][17] The ideas continued to face resistance though some passive cooling was incorporated into the design of the 0.85 m (2.8 ft) diameter Spitzer Space Telescope launched in 2003.
[11] The ideas were later adopted in full for the 6.5 m (21 ft) diameter James Webb Space Telescope launched in 2021.